Lesson Plan Idea for an ESL literacy course
Posted by Zhizhen Fang on 31st May 2013
Lesson Plan Idea
Background: The lesson plan is designed for an ESL literacy course. The ESL students who take the course are either exchange students or international students who are pursuing a bachelor degree at the college. The course emphasizes integrating literary sources into academic writings. The lesson takes place in the first week of the term.
Learning Objectives
• Help students to build their schemata for the first writing assignment.
• Develop students’ ability in writing to read as well as in reading to write.
Enabling Objectives (Students will be able to):
• Using free writing to build up content schemata;
• Identify and summarize the main ideas of an article;
• Discuss and share their point of views in groups. Notes on Prior Work
• Students have been introduced to the course, requirements syllabus and the final Portfolio. Materials
• Copies of scripts of a speech.
• Ss’ free writing notebook.
Lesson Outline
1. Free writing task [10 min.]
• Give Ss 5 min. to free write on what is good writing from their own perspectives.
• Ask Ss to discuss their free writing in pairs.
• Give Ss chance to share their free writing if they want. 2. Summarizing a dictation [5 min.]
• Teacher tells Ss to take notes on the main points of an excerpt she will dictate later from William Zinsser’s speech, Writing English as a Second Language that is addressed to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (see Appendix A).
3. Understanding the dictation [20 min.]
• Ask Ss to compare notes in pairs
• Tell Ss to reconvene and report the main points of the dictation to the whole class
• Write down Ss’ findings on the board
• Give Ss the script of the excerpt
• Ask Ss to read the script and compare their findings with the script: Is there anything missing in the findings?
4. Group discussion on the dictation [15 min.]
• Assign Ss to group of three.
• Ask Ss to talk about what is good writing in their own culture. Do they agree or disagree with the speaker’s view that the notion of good writing depends on the culture it resides in.
• Inform Ss that each group needs to select one person to report their group discussion back to the whole class.
• The representatives of each group present a summary of their group discussions.
Endnote: The format on page 17 is very detail oriented. It divides the whole lesson outline into five sections. Each section contains a small objective to accomplish. I was not used to this kind of format when I made my lesson plan because I tended to think about the content first and then build up the content towards the objectives of the lesson. I think the format of lesson plan allows me to align with the enabling objectives while developing a lesson. The section I will add to the lesson plan is probably a preview section of the next lesson.
Appendix A
I’ll start with a question: What is good writing?
It depends on what country you’re from. We all know what’s considered “good writing” in our own country. We grow up immersed in the cadences and sentence structure of the language we were born into, so we think, “That’s probably what every country considers good writing; they just use different words.” If only! I once asked a student from Cairo, “What kind of language is Arabic?” I was trying to put myself into her mental process of switching from Arabic to English. She said, “It’s all adjectives.”
Well, of course it’s not all adjectives, but I knew what she meant: it’s decorative, it’s ornate, it’s intentionally pleasing. Another Egyptian student, when I asked him about Arabic, said, “It’s all proverbs. We talk in proverbs. People say things like ‘What you are seeking is also seeking you.’” He also told me that Arabic is full of courtesy and deference, some of which is rooted in fear of the government. “You never know who’s listening,” he said, so it doesn’t hurt to be polite. That’s when I realized that when foreign students come to me with a linguistic problem it may also be a cultural or a political problem.
Now I think it’s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I wish Icould walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs. But all those adjectives and all that decoration would be the ruin of any journalist trying to write good English. No proverbs, please.
Spanish also comes with a heavy load of beautiful baggage that will smother any journalist writing in English. The Spanish language is a national treasure, justly prized by Spanish-speaking people. But what makes it a national treasure is its long sentences and melodious long nouns that express a general idea. Those nouns are rich in feeling, but they have no action in them—no people doing something we can picture. My Spanish-speaking students must be given the bad news that those long sentences will have to be cruelly chopped up into short sentences with short nouns and short active verbs that drive the story forward. What’s considered “good writing” in Spanish is not “good writing” in English.
So what is good English—the language we’re here today to wrestle with? It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. It has a huge vocabulary of words that have precise shades of meaning; there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English—if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong. Those are the damaging habits I want to warn you about today.
Posted in Sources and Resources | No Comments »
)